Tag Archives: antisemitism

Hating on Jews is all the rage

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Young people are slaves to fashion. (That’s one vice I’ve never been accused of, even when I was young.)

You name it – mustaches, bell-bottom jeans, Barack Obama, hula hoops, big hair, Burt Reynolds, electric cars, transexuals, solar panels, line-dancing to country music, etc., etc., etc.

Someday, there may be a fashion convergence on Netflix where we have a mustachioed Barack Obama, sporting big hair and bell-bottomed jeans, line-dancing to country music with a transexual Burt Reynolds playing with a hula hoop as they both get run over by a Tesla fired by a solar panel.

Meanwhile, we have antisemitism.

It’s all the rage. Ignorant college students chant “from the river to the sea” but can’t tell you the name of the river or the name of the sea.

These kids believe that Jews are racists for “occupying” the land between those two unnamable waters – for some 3,000 years. And so, they hate them and their Jewishness.

The reason they believe this is (1) because they’ve been told it’s true by the kids who are cool because their skin is dark and their foreign accent is strong, (2) because human nature is such that hate produces pleasurable endorphins, and (3) because it’s fashionable.

They still celebrate the torture and massacre of Jews on that horrible October 7, even as they caution (sometimes, but not usually) that it’s not the Jews they want massacred, but the Israelis. At the same time, they harass and persecute Jews on campus who have no attachment to Israel other than Jewishness.

Like most fashions that come around, this one has been around before. The first Jewish temple in Jerusalem was destroyed by the Babylonians in 587 BC. The second temple was destroyed by the Romans in 70 AD. The subsequent Jewish diaspora scattered thousands of Jews through Europe where they were persecuted for two millennia through soft bigotry and hard pogroms.

The discrimination reached an apex in a holocaust. Until the middle of the 20th century, that word meant “destruction or slaughter on a mass scale.” Now, the word is inseparable from an event of unspeakable horror, “The Holocaust.”

European bigotry immigrated to the Americas. As late as the 20th century, Harvard refused to admit Jews. Even now, they impose an informal limit on the number of Jewish admittees. Those who are admitted have been advised not to wear a visible Star of David, lest they trigger the Jew-haters.

When prestige schools occasionally protect the Jewish students, it is reluctantly and ambiguously. The leftists running these outfits smugly justify their tolerance for bigotry and even violence on the grounds of academic freedom. “Free to Hate” could well replace “Veritas” at Harvard.

As it has for thousands of years, Jewish merit overcomes much of this bigotry. Although Jews comprise only about 0.2% of the worldwide population and only about 1% of the American population, some 22% of Nobel Prize winners have been Jewish.

But the soft discrimination continues in matters not governed objectively by merit. For example, Americans have never elected a President or Vice President who was Jewish. (To their credit, the Jews have not clamored for one. That’s not the way they roll.)

Antisemitism particularly burns in the Middle East. Jews have been essentially expelled from Egypt, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, Iran, Iraq, Syria and Lebanon – practically all of the Muslim countries of the Middle East. Jews are not so much discriminated against in those countries – they’re banned.

You might think that Israel has responded in kind, but they haven’t. Non-Jews exist side-by-side with Jews in Israel. In fact, about 21% of Israelis are Muslim.

It is this Jew-hating bigotry for which the young idiots on college campuses are useful. While they enjoy sunny springtime hijinks designed mainly to prove up their fashion consciousness in the college cocoon, Jews in the real world are actively discriminated against, threatened existentially, and occasionally raped, taken hostage, beheaded and murdered.

Fads pass and fashion is fleeting. If only this one were.

Columbia is led by a mom. They need a leader.

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Moms are wonderful creatures. They soothe, and they smooth. They resolve conflict with milk and cookies. Without moms, we wouldn’t be here.

Not all women are moms. Joan of Arc was not a soother or a smoother, and was never a mom. Nor was Amelia Earhart or Queen Elizabeth I.

Even among strong women who were mothers, not all were moms. Golda Meir and Margaret Thatcher had children but, to the public at least, they were not moms. Some women can change from a skirt into pants and back again, depending on the setting, and maybe Meir and Thatcher did. Others can’t.

My point is, a “mom” is a collection of feminine traits possessed usually by women (and occasionally by men) which are very useful in the right circumstances.

Being in charge of Columbia University in the year 2025 is not the right circumstance.

Let’s back up. Universities have been left-leaning for at least two generations. That leftism has been reinforced in recent years by federal money. Both public and private universities receive billions in federal tax dollars. Politicians on the left always liked that, because they liked the leverage they get with that money.

“Promote leftist ideology, or we’ll withhold the money,” they told the universities. It’s not that they needed to bully universities into promoting leftist ideology – the universities were happy to do that without being bullied – but lefty politicians bullied them anyway because they just enjoy bullying people.

After the October 7, 2023 massacre, Columbia became a hotbed of terrorist sympathizers. The sympathizers sought not just to support terror abroad, but to import it into America. They terrorized Jewish students and violently advocated the eradication of Israel along with its Jewish inhabitants.

The leaders of Columbia turned a blind eye to this terror. That’s because Columbia is a leftist place, and the left hates Jews.

The reasons the left hates Jews is a bigger issue, but it boils down to: (1) They see Judaism, correctly, as a pillar of Western Civilization, and they hate civilization; (2) They see Jews as typically being very meritorious, and they hate merit because it interferes with identity politics; and (3) They just hate Jews.

The left often gets a pass for their Jew-hate on the grounds that Jews are usually not dark-skinned. After the horror of 10/7, our leading universities not only equivocated in their condemnation of the terror, they seemed to sympathize with the terrorists.  

The gentlepersons of Congress invited the leaders of Columbia, Harvard, Penn, MIT and other universities to testify about this misplaced sympathy for terrorists.

Those leaders suggested – apparently in coordination beforehand – that calling for the annihilation of Israel, harassing Jewish students, and encouraging violence in antisemitic protests might or might not be acceptable depending on the “context.”

History is still being written on the ultimate outcome of that testimony, but the history-writing is over for at least three of those university leaders. Public outcry forced them out of their presidents’ offices and back to the safe ivory towers of their professorships.

The replacement president of Columbia joins a long and distinguished line of presidents there, including Dwight D. Eisenhower. This new one is a doctor – a real one, not a “Doctor” Jill. She’s a smart woman.

She’s also a mother of three and, as I’m about to explain, a mom.

President Trump is not. As promised, he has taken higher education to the woodshed. He has demanded that universities put an end to their systemic antisemitism. He has threatened to cut off the federal money spigot if they don’t rejoin civilized society.

The mom who is newly in charge at Columbia did what moms do in such circumstances; she smoothed and soothed. Trump had a list of about three principal and principled demands. She said “yes, yes and yes.”

Then she went back to Columbia and got an earful from the leftist faculty there, demanding that she rescind her agreement with Trump. To the faculty, she said “OK, OK and OK.”

Then the Trump administration got wind of her rescission. They demanded that she publicly and humiliatingly reiterate her earlier agreement to their demands. They demanded she rescind her rescission.

She again said, “yes, yes and yes.”

Now neither side trusts her, for good reason. Whatever she does, both sides will suspect and allege she’s not doing what she promised them she would do.

I doubt milk and cookies will smooth this over.

Why do American Jews vote against Israel?

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For a hundred years, American Jews have overwhelmingly voted for the Democrat candidate. Franklin Roosevelt received about 80% of the Jewish vote each time. This dramatic tilt toward the Democrats continued up through the turn of the century, when they gave Al Gore about 79%. They gave Obama 78% in his first election, and even gave him 69% in his second – after Obama’s antipathy toward Israel became impossible to overlook.

Some of this Jewish support for Democrats is understandable. Like most immigrants, the Jews suffered discrimination at the hands of silk-stocking Republicans. American intellectuals in the early- to mid-20th century took their cue from Europe, where antisemitism was rampant (and still is). Two generations ago in America, there were still Jewish country clubs because the ordinary Republican-dominated ones denied admittance to Jews.

All of that is shameful, and, I’m glad to say, nearly all of that is now behind us.

In this century, it’s the Democrats who exhibit an antisemitic undercurrent. It was evident in Barack Obama’s support for Iran – a Jew-hating terrorism state that denies there was a Holocaust in the past while openly urging one in the future.

Obama was willing to let Iran get nukes, ostensibly not for the purpose of making good on their Holocaust threat (wink, wink). He even sent them billions that they used to fund their nuke program.

In the Biden administration, the Democrats’ anti-Israel stance grew. They begged the Iranians to rejoin the one-sided deal that Obama gave them (and Trump revoked) and also stopped enforcing international sanctions. That allowed them to resume lucrative oil exports to fund their nukes again – and to fund terrorists attacking Israel.

After the October 7 pogrom, many Democrats equated Israel’s effort to defend itself, on the one hand, with Hamas’ invasion, rapes, beheadings, torture, random rocket attacks, and kidnapping and murder of men, women and children, on the other hand.

I assumed that these last four years of Democrat hostility toward Israel would finally tilt the Jewish vote toward Republicans in 2024.

I was wrong. Jews voted 68% for the Democrat in 2020, and this year they still voted somewhere between 66% and 79% for the Democrat (it’s difficult for exit polls to get a fix on the number). And this was for a Democrat who openly pandered to Muslim radicals.

So, what’s up with American Jews?

I have a theory.

But first, let me admit the ignorant and the speculative nature of my theory. I grew up in the wilds of Colorado, and literally had never met a Jew (at least not knowingly) until I went away to college. My current Jewish friends tend to be strong Israel supporters and, likewise, strong Republicans; my generalizations therefore do not apply to them specifically. I now have tremendous respect for both Judaism and Jewish culture (and have often written about it) but cannot claim any real expertise in the subject.

Subject to all that, here goes.

Somewhere around seven million Jews live in America – nearly as many as in Israel. Together, those two countries comprise 80% of the world’s Jewish population.

Israeli Jews are different than American Jews. Israeli Jews are mostly first- or second-generation immigrants to Israel. Jews who immigrate to the Jewish state of Israel tend to be practicing Jews, unsurprisingly. A disproportionate number are Orthodox Jews. They believe deeply in Judaism and they believe deeply in Israel. 

American Jews, not so much. While many are devout, at least a third are not observant of their religion at all. (This is not intended as a criticism. Most self-identifying Christians are not observant of their religion either.) Deeply religious Orthodox Jews are relatively rare in America.

The result is that American Jews are less invested emotionally in the Land of Abraham.

That’s hard to dispute. But I submit that it goes beyond that.

Many American Jews have not just failed to embrace Judaism, but have casually or consciously rejected it. People who reject long-standing family and religious traditions tend to feel some guilt and need some rationalizations. Rejection of one’s heritage typically morphs into hostility toward that heritage.  

In the case of the many non-observant American Jews, it’s possible that their ambivalence toward Israel – which seems to manifest in outright opposition every four years at election time – is rooted in a rejection of their ancestral faith which naturally morphs into hostility toward it.

In agnosticism, as in religion, there’s no zealot like a convert.